North American Mosaic

North American Mosaic brings together music shaped by the many histories, cultures, and experiences found across this continent. Moving from the beginnings of American choral music to works by living composers, the program explores ancestry, migration, faith, injustice, memory, and the enduring search for home.

Ysaye M. Barnwell’s We Are celebrates the ancestry, individuality, and beauty within each of us. William Billings—regarded as the nation’s first choral composer—offers an earlier American voice in The Bird, his adaptation of Psalm 11. Florence Price’s Resignation, with words and music by Price, reflects on the pain and sorrow of slavery with quiet emotional power.

Questions of home and belonging emerge in Craig Hella Johnson’s Reaching and Kile Smith’s Northland. Johnson explores the longing we may feel when we are far from home, while Smith’s choral suite sets four poems by Jamaican-born Harlem Renaissance writer Claude McKay that speak to the immigrant experience. In Gimikwenden Ina—“Do You Remember?”—Corey Payette recounts the boarding-school experiences that many young Indigenous people were forced to endure.

The program also embraces the energy, humor, and nostalgia of American popular traditions. Charles Ives composed Circus Band while a student at Yale, capturing the exuberance and delightful chaos of a passing circus parade. Aaron Copland’s Old American Songs, Book 1, arranged for chorus by Irving Fine, gathers music ranging from a minstrel-show tune and political satire to lyrical ballads and a playful children’s song.

Faith and community are heard in Brandon Williams’s arrangement of Spirit of the Living God, conceived as a meditation on memories of growing up in the church. William Dawson’s Ain’ a That Good News brings the exuberance of the African American spiritual, while Arnold Sevier’s arrangement of Thomas Dorsey’s Precious Lord draws from the deeply expressive tradition of gospel music.

Together, these works offer no single definition of North America. Instead, they form a mosaic—many voices and stories, each distinct, yet more meaningful when heard together.